From: George Dyson
Date: 4.13.02

Twelve years ago I was invited to join the Reality Club. It changed my life. Brockman's genius was in recognizing that there was something about science (and some but not all scientists) that transcended the boundaries of the profession itself. If you were deeply and completely engaged in trying to better understand some aspect of reality, you could give a talk about it, and thereby join the Club. I talked about 18th-century Aleut/Russian kayaks in Alaska and my attempts to reconstruct them, and I passed.

I am not suggesting that "The New Humanists" is a hoax, like Alan Sokal's "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," but I believe that it is a test. Brockman is testing us too-comfortable members of the old Reality Club, now settled into our overstuffed browsers, to see if we will wake up and say, "Hey! Wait a minute! This is exactly the kind of talk about talk and writing about writing that's so far removed from objective reality that it won't get you into the Club! Who let this guy in here, anyway?"

We now return to our normal programming. This was only a test.

GEORGE DYSON, a historian among futurists, is the author of Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship. [more....]

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